Intricate Under the Sea: 45 Underwater Designs to Color Book

Excellent dose-of-reality counterpoint to Peter Mattheissen's more lyrical/philosophical The Snow Leopard. Montgomery's story follows Tom McCarthy - conservation director for the Seattle-based Snow Leopard Trust - during one of his periodic research trips to Mongolia's Altai Mountains in search of its native leopards. (To my surprise, Mongolia is home to fully a third of the world's remaining snow leopard populations. Another fun fact: while Nepal's - i.e., Mattheissen's - snow leopards generally roam over a home territory of 11-23 square miles, in Mongolian, a single leopard's range is more than 380 square miles!)

This is science at it's most boring but also most realistic. It's a constant schedule climbing, falling and freezing, all in the hopes of finding mere "signs" of snow leopard presence, (no leopards were spotted during this three week trip - in fact, McCarthy went one period of nine years without actually seeing a wild leopard; and indeed, all the beautiful leopard photos in this book were taken of animals in captivity/breeding programs). So what do they look for? Scratch marks, pee stains, paw prints...and poop - lots and lots of poop. Yet they come away with valuable data that will be analyzed later to help determine the size and range of the Altai/Gobi leopards. ('Nuther fun fact - the fastest way to determine whether their collected poop did in fact come from leopards and not bears, wolves or foxes, is to use specially-trained sniffer dogs back here in the States.)

Montgomery is a born adventurer and an excellent writer - the Boston Globe described her as "part Indiana Jones, part Emily Dickinson." She's written a number of books in this series, and does a great job mixing peripheral information into her main topic - in this case, sidebars on Genghis Khan, the daily life of Mongolian nomads (think "yaks and sheep"), the return from extinction of the takhi (better known in the west as Przewalski's Horse), etc. However, she's written a number of animal-focused books for adult readers as well, including several biographies of naturalists like Temple Grandin, Dian Fossey/Jane Goodall, etc.

You can support the Snow Leopard Trust through their website - www.snowleopardtrust.org - with donations, by "adopting" a snow leopard, or by purchasing their products. Both this book and the overall cause of "Saving the Snow Leopard" are highly recommended to nature lovers and conservationists everywhere.